Terrance Gore: You Will Believe a Man Can Fly

All I need to explain my life and the universe is one more Great Moment in Pinch Running. I'm hoping for it to occur in the next week or so.

It could happen. The 2014 World Series is as likely to include a crucial flash of pinch running as any Fall Classic in the last 40 years, if not ever. For one thing, neither the Giants nor the Royals are particularly potent on offense. This is the first year since the famously pitcher-dominated 1968 campaign in which both World Series teams failed to score over 700 runs in the regular season. Easy to imagine a speedster being inserted late in a game to claw out an elusive run. For another thing, the Royals have employed this strategy of inserting pinch runners all season long, and they bolstered their already well-fortified team speed with the late-season addition of Terrance Gore.

Gore appears to be the real-life counterpart to a certain recurring fantasy the older of my two sons has begun engaging in.

"I'm fast," Jack says. He's three and so has not been running so long as to take it for granted. To him, running is magic. He has me fasten a cape around his neck.

"You can't catch me," he says. "My superpower is I'm fast."

I can explain most of my life through the two definitive pinch running incidents in baseball history. The fortieth anniversary of the first moment occurred last week. You could argue that it really deserves to stand as the most definitive, as it was a failure. My guess is that if the strategy of pinch running were ever analyzed comprehensively, it would be shown to be so negligibly effective as to be mathematically indistinguishable from sheer nothingness.

The same could be argued about everything, of course. Religion, literature, love, nightly ab-crunching regimens: in terms of the pure math, what difference does any of it make, really? By a hundred years from now all of us will have been pinch-run for, and eventually the whole planet will be sent to the showers.

"Hey, remember that guy?" will say no one.

But we keep on devising new, absurd attempts to obscure the terrifying void; for example, the pinch runner who symbolizes my childhood and its long, ever-collapsing aftermath: Herb Washington.

The Oakland A's hired Washington, an elite sprinter with no notable baseball experience, in 1974. They'd already begun using pinch runners in an unprecedented manner of isolated specialization, most notably with a player named Allan Lewis, and would continue to do so after Washington with speedsters such as Don Hopkins, Matt Alexander, and Larry Lintz, but all of these players also occasionally swung a bat or manned a position in the field. Washington never did either (allowing for a fascinatingly unique 1975 baseball card) and was thrown out stealing a whopping 16 times, causing more than enough rally-stalling outs to cancel any benefit from his 29 successful steals. Also, he was reputedly a maddeningly ineffective baserunner on batted balls.

You can see all you need to see about Herb Washington's feel for the game, or lack thereof, in a clip from 40 years ago last week when, standing as the potential ninth-inning tying run in the second game of the World Series, he was picked off base by Mike Marshall. A fractured beach chair tumbling down a dune would display more grace than Washington lurching back to the bag after being lulled and then fooled by Marshall. I see most of my life in that clip, the absurdity, the superfluity. Even the awkward act of trying to get back to the bag mimics my constant foraying into the past for some impossible return to certainty.

Washington himself got up from that play and moved on with his life, eventually becoming perhaps the most financially successful of all the dynastic 1970s A's—he currently owns dozens of McDonalds franchises in Ohio. I have on the other hand always carried with me some manner of crumpling surrender, as if in acute perpetual awareness that Steve Garvey is about to slap the tag on me. Life has nonetheless carried me forward through some inexplicable miracles. For example: my friends, my family—an unaccountable web of love. I see all these things reflected in the current reigning moment of pinch running supremacy, which occurred 10 years ago last week, when Dave Roberts entered Game Four of the 2004 American League Championship Series as a ninth-inning baserunning substitute for Kevin Millar and proceeded to steal second base and then wheel around to score the tying run on a base hit by Bill Mueller.

Roberts' steal has become the primary talisman of Red Sox fans such as myself wanting to conjure the holiness of the team's unsurpassable 2004 efforts, which is saying something considering that legendary postseason campaign also included Curt Schilling's bloody stigmata. But a wound-stained sock is no match for the feeling that after you should have died you are somehow still alive. I once fell off a cliff on a mountain bike and—for some unaccountable reason—did not die. For days afterward, everything glowed. Before the insertion of Roberts as a pinch runner the Red Sox were dead, and after he scored—I remember saying exactly this: We're alive!

Not "I'm alive." We're alive. That's a key part of it, too. Roberts' pinch running was so clearly a brief moment without which the whole miraculous championship could not have occurred, but in being so it was also a passageway through which all the other essential moments large and small were revealed. Millar's walk, Mueller's hit, some necessary scoreless relief by previously irrelevant bullpen mannequin Curtis Leskanic, on and on, every member of the roster chipping in with some feat without which the whole dream would have collapsed. We're all in this together, part of a web of something that's bigger than all of us and that is us. That's what the pinch runner Dave Roberts tells me.

So I know through pinch running that life is a crumpling, ongoing failure and also that it's unaccountably a miracle of love, but I still don't know how to explain a certain feeling that I've gotten sometimes throughout my life, the most intense instance of this feeling happening this year one morning in June. My wife was in a tub in the middle of the living room and two midwives and a doula were around her. Every few minutes she would begin screaming, but we were in a quiet interval, an electrified stillness. Our first child, Jack, had been born amid a multiplying cluster of medical interventions nearly three years earlier in a hospital, and there were no quiet moments there, no moments of stillness, just machinery and aloof professional murmuring and my wife's enforced passivity and implacable agony. We were going a different way with the second kid. Through the living room window I watched a woman in a sparkly purple helmet glide by on a bicycle. The sun was shining. Some distance away a truck was backing up, beeping.

I had a catch in my throat. Something pure was about to arrive.

Literally speaking, Terrance Gore was summoned by the Kansas City Royals from the minors (he spent most of the season in A ball), but figuratively he seems to have been coaxed into our plodding realm straight from some Cool Papa Bell mythology. All you need to do to start imagining Gore at night turning out his bedroom light and then getting under the covers before the room is dark, or getting hit by his own line drive while rounding second base, is watchthe clip of him scoring a game-winning run from second on an infield hit. It shades its previously far-fetched fictional predecessor—the cartoonishly fantastical, division-winning, bunt-catalyzed dash of Willie Mays Hayes—into lumbering realism. Terrance Gore is faster than you can imagine, and in eight stolen base attempts this year, five in the regular season, and three more in the playoffs, he has not been caught. He's pure.

I can explain most of my life in light of the two most definitive pinch running incidents in baseball history, but I can't explain this feeling I get sometimes, a catch in my throat. You feel like you're on the brink of something wholly beyond words.

So I want to see Terrance Gore come into a game sometime in the next few days with the outcome of the season in the balance. I want to see Terrance Gore take his lead. I want to feel that moment, a hitch, a connection, just before he starts to fly.